Covid-19 vaccine: Serum Institute signs up for 100 million doses of vaccines for India, low and middle-income countries

In a move that will bolster the attempts of coronavirus vaccine development and delivery to India and other countries, the Serum Institute of India has joined hands with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The joined efforts have been launched to speed up the process of development of the vaccine for Covid-19 and to ensure the delivery of up to 100 million doses of the elusive vaccines for India and low and middle-income countries when developed.

Through this joint funding approach, the SII will be enabled with ammunition for the at-risk manufacturing for candidate vaccines from AstraZeneca and Novavax. The vaccine, when developed from candidates from AstraZeneca and Novavax, will be available for procurement if the companies successfully obtain full licensure and prequalification from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Novavax has said that the joint venture with the SII is expected to provide around 100 crore doses of its vaccine candidate– NVX-CoV2373 for India and low and middle-income countries, Novavax said.

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Under the agreement, the Serum Institute will be responsible for the submission of regulatory and marketing authorisations while Novavax will provide both vaccine antigen and Matrix‐M adjuvant to the Serum Institute.

Novavax announced earlier this month that its vaccine candidate was generally well-tolerated and elicited numerically superior robust antibody responses to those seen in phase I and phase II studies of human convalescent sera.

“We believe that Novavax’ NVX-CoV2373 has significant potential to successfully prevent COVID-19. Given our experience with Novavax on the development of a malaria vaccine, we know the power of their vaccine technologies. We will work urgently together to bring this vaccine to patients in these geographies.”, Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer of Serum Institute of India had said on the partnership with Novavax.

Earlier, Serum Institute has collaborated with Oxford University-AstraZeneca to manufacture Covid vaccine in India and received the approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to conduct Phase II+III clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccine– COVISHIELD in India.